


what we were to each other we were in equal measure

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-13
Updated: 2010-10-13
Packaged: 2017-10-12 17:49:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/127454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully without Mulder lacked context.</p>
            </blockquote>





	what we were to each other we were in equal measure

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [if I stepped out of my body](https://archiveofourown.org/works/137379) by [leiascully](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully). 



> Timeline: S7  
> A/N: From the one line that's been in my journal on a page by itself for years now. The title is cribbed and altered from something I don't recall at the moment. Happy 10/13. This isn't what I expected to write, but it's what came out.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

Scully without Mulder lacked context.

She had always hated women like that - people like that - those sad incomplete codependent souls mooching around their one bedroom apartments. She had sworn never to be one of them again, not after the agony of hours waiting for the phone to ring, Daniel's voice on the other end.

She was young then. She was less young now. She had gone through the fire and been reforged, but the only indication was the circles under her eyes. Her mother fussed. Mulder slipped candy bars into her desk drawers.

There were nights she hated him for this, for making her completely unsuitable for any other person on earth. Even at her family's dinner table she found herself biting her tongue, swallowing the stories she might have told if they wouldn't have dimmed the light in her mother's eyes and lit a fire in Bill's. There was no one who would understand them, except Mulder, at her shoulder through hellfire. Some nights she couldn't help but hate him for hauling her into this chiaroscuro life without absolutes or absolution. At the same time, she heard her father's gentle scolding: "Don't blame Fox for your own hard head, Starbuck." She had jumped in with both feet, two hands braced around the butt of her pistol as she leveled it at those who would harm him, who would violate his puzzling, meandering, credulous, incredible mind.

It wasn't that she missed him. How could she? He was never farther away than a phonecall, and usually as close as her own mind, a mental Mulder peering over her shoulder, stumbling over the ends of her sentences in his eagerness. It was that she forgot that the real Mulder, the corporeal Mulder, the Mulder who was frustrating on a physical as well as a metaphysical level wasn't really there with his feet all over her couch and his tendency to drink juice from the bottle. It irritated her to turn to address a particularly solvent point in their ongoing debate and find the room empty.

So there she was: sentences left unfinished, stories untold because he wasn't there to fill in the details and make it all sound plausible or at least more like a crusade and less like a whim, casing the corners of her own apartment without any backup.

She was haunted. Almost she envied Lyda her certainty in love, in death. Death wasn't her own answer - they'd been too close too many times - but this wasn't either, this half-existence. Her former friends bored and irritated her, and she them. At the Bureau she had no one but Mulder and Skinner, both at arm's length.

"You make me a whole person," he had said before. It was true. She had never thought of the tragedy of it, only the romance (briefly - some fires could consume her entirely). Together, yes, they were whole. Edgy and quarrelsome but whole. They argued around the same points, moved around each other as if they'd been sharing their personal space all their lives, and picked up exactly where they'd left off. With him she never wondered who she was (mother briefly, sister, daughter, friend, partner): she was Scully and he was Mulder and they informed and reformed each other.

Without him, she told a different story. Without him, she chafed in her own skin trying to make her life comprehensible to her siblings and her therapist. And that left her on her own of a Saturday night, cleaning her gun and editing another article about her improbable science - a xenopathologist, someone had called her - with a remembered whiff of Chinese takeout tempting her to pick up the phone and have him peer over her shoulder for real, never dropping rice down her shirt despite his habit of tripping over himself, insisting that she add a few Oxford commas to her rigorously vetted prose, just for the elegance of it.

She smiled despite herself. The doorbell rang.


End file.
